Yay! I was tagged! I usually struggle with this sort of thing. Hard to think of ten facts off the top of my head. But I guess I should follow the trend, so;

1. I only drink Green Tea. I gave up milk, caffeine and fizzy drinks.

2. This Winter I am gonna get my tummy pierced - when I can afford it!

3. I aspire to one day earn a pair of Jimmy Choo.

4. Despite being a PC Gamer, I do not own a gaming mouse. I hope to fix this at christmas.

5. I really don't like dogs. With the exception of pugs, of course.

6. My favourite type of artwork is figuritive and concept.

7. My favourite meal this winter is beef and black bean sauce.

8. When I am older, I want to own a herb garden.

9. I really love coconut.

10. My phone bill is always over because I text a lot.

Okay, so uh... Now I have to tag someone? Hm. Oh, I don't know. Can't someone tag people for me?

Wait, I'm going to tag Naomz back! She said she had more to say.

So, my preordered copy of Dragon Age (PS3) arrived early Saturday morning - a day late, I would like to highlight. I have been playing it large chunks throughout my weekend and so far it is forty pound very, very well spent.

I am an RPG lover, especially when they commit to the old-school feel of RPGs. I adore attention to detail, strong stories, looting corpses, upgrading my armour and weapons... Side Quests are my Sunday morning wake up call. In truth I did not expect DA:O to live up to any of my expectations. In fact, I don't think I even knew what to expect. Sure; I had it tracked for months and watched videos and looked at screenshots but I still did not think it would end up being a traditional RPG.

From the moment of inserting my disk and after waiting for a long and tedious install process I knew I was going to enjoy it. Admittedly the graphics let me down a little, especially with my mum in my ear saying what she says about any game: "It doesn't look as good as Heavenly Sword, Han" - Well, yes, mother. That's because that game was shorter than my little finger. I guess it serves me right for venturing off the PC though.

I particuarly liked how prior to starting your new game it asks you about difficulty level. Not because I'm too chicken to play anything above easy or anything, but because the descriptions were pretty much like: "New to RPGs, need all the help you can get" and "A RPG veteran". It's just nice that the game has nodded to people who don't just live off the mainstream FPS games.

As for the story I am very much enthralled so far. Sometimes I feel a little out of my depth with the sheer amount of information I get from NPCs, but I find that all loose ends end up tied as I progress anyway. I like the freedom of character I get when conversing with people involved in both the main story and side quests. I can shape my character to be an absolute cow, or an affectionate knight. Instead of two answers I can get up to four, all wildly different. However, this is sometimes a bad thing as I can take about 5 minutes deciding which response is more "moral".

At the moment I could only moan about one thing; the slow progression of armour. I'm a bit of an armour freak (not in real life, durr) meaning that I like to change it every 5 seconds. I love finding new armour that's twice the defense and looks hot. Alas, my character has been wearing Heavy Chainmail for about 5 gameplay hours now. Sure, it's changed material and defence - but it looks the same! The same applies to weapons too - I've not found any serious improvements in weapons in any stores or loot yet. Perhaps this is good though, delayed gratification and all.

So yes, that is my thoughts on Dragon Age so far. All in all I am very pleased. I feel very much involved with the game. It is not too hard or too easy, it's detailed, it all makes sense, the graphics are good (I think I expected them to be 4th gen or something, comes with not buying a new console game since AC1), the story is interesting, the character development is interesting, the party morale and approval system adds a new spin...

Yeah, I like this game.

Not long ago, my mum mentioned to me a documentary she had seen about Chinese workers inhaling noxious fumes from recycling old computers. Being bored of games due to being ill, I decided to research it.

This was the first article I found.

It is a short little photo journal showing what goes on with our abandoned electrical goods. Trenches of broken computer glass, cooking silicon chips for trace amount of gold... It is shocking that tonnes upon tonnes of electricals are dumped here for "recycling"... As raw materials they must be worth billions of pounds, but with no method of actually extracting, recycling or refining the villages just become dumping grounds.

It is safe to say that both the Western world and these villages depends on computers for their every day life, but the divide could not be any bigger. We enhance our lives with computers. and they pick through our cast offs for precious metals.

"According to the Basel Action Network, a pile of 500 computers contains 717kg of lead, 1.36kg of cadmium, 863 grams of chromium and 287 grams of mercury"

A happy little statistic I found on a seperate article. And to think, we were evacuated from high school science labs because someone broke a mercury thermometer.

"Up to 50-million tons of e-waste is generated worldwide each year — enough to fill a line of garbage collection trucks stretching halfway around the world" - Wow, just, wow.

Looking a little more, I found this surreal video. It's 20 minutes long but well worth the watch.

The "Toxic Trade" has turned a pristine water village in Ghana to a waste ground with a dead river - one of the most polluted rivers in the world!? And I thought the thames was bad.

Young boys skim through the soil with magnets from old speakers to collect tiny fragments of precious metal, most of which are radioactive. Recently in Geography, I did a module on the UN and its schemes to "bridge the digital divide" by getting the third world connected through donations. All these computers (that we payed how much for?) could be used to provide better technology, better communications, better everything for the third world but due to lack of funds, resources, factories, education and god knows what else the people of the villages are reduced to cooking the motherboards for precious metals instead.

Anyway, I just thought I would share my feelings with GS in my blog, as it has been a large eyeopener for me. I didn't realise that the fast paced technology industry in the West has such gigantic effects on small farming villages.